MAX SUMMIT 2026 Day 1 — the Question Moved From Adopting AI to Connecting It

AI is rapidly changing advertising, content production, data analysis and how organizations work. The corporate question has moved past whether to adopt AI toward how to connect it to customer choice and business results. Here are the threads from day one of MAX SUMMIT 2026, which opened August 3 at COEX in Seoul.

Now in its twelfth year, the conference ran under the theme "The AI Era: What Wins – WHY, HOW, SYSTEM, MARKET," organized around why brands get chosen, how things sell, how organizations should work and where new growth comes from. Platform companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Netflix and TikTok appeared alongside brands such as KFC, Kurly, Yeogi Eottae and LG Electronics.

1. Platforms on advertising and work

Morning sessions focused on the marketing opportunities generative AI creates and on workplace transformation — marketing strategy using ChatGPT Ads, how AI agents and copilots change work, and brand growth strategies on OTT and short-form platforms. Attention centered less on feature explanations than on connecting AI to actual advertising performance, customer connection and organizational productivity.

2. What brands must protect

However fast AI and automation spread, technology cannot substitute for brand essence. Cases in brand revitalization, AI-driven work transformation, and service change and customer communication were used to separate what should change from what should be preserved. The framing: what matters is not adopting AI but how a brand's own message and customer experience get delivered anew.

3. Why people choose

Afternoon sessions asked why, in an era when AI can produce content, people still choose particular brands and stories. Growth experience from global content channels, brand-creator collaboration, and how offline F&B brands build relationships with fans were all presented. AI can accelerate production, but what makes people remember, share and return is a brand's own planning and story.

4. From production to operations

AI is expanding from a drafting tool into marketing operations broadly — AI transformation connecting ad production to campaign management, GEO and SEO strategy, and customer experience and corporate content cases. In AI search environments especially, being discoverable requires continuously accumulating searchable content and data rather than one-off responses.

5. From individuals to organizations

Later sessions addressed what an organization needs to use AI collectively rather than individually. Adoption alone does not raise performance: it requires building an environment and work processes people can actually use, organizing data, and setting usage standards suited to the organization. Cases from game marketing, content production and corporate AI transformation projects showed how to raise output quality alongside speed.

6. The through-line

The more work AI takes on, the clearer the territory marketers and brands must decide themselves becomes. Technology accelerates content production and campaign operations, but it does not decide why customers choose a brand or how an organization uses the technology. Competitiveness in the AI era depends less on how many tools you use than on connecting them to brand assets, content, customer experience and organizational execution.

For the brand content session from the same event, see Brand Message Becomes Content, Content Becomes Fandom; for the session on brand competitiveness, see What Sulbing and Terarosa Actually Sell Is Time.